Agreed. Although with the caveat that, had there been more stringent regulations surrounding misinformation and manipulation in political and media discourse for the UK, Brexit would never have been able to occur. Leave got there (and only just) through a multitude of lies and emotional manipulation.

Direct democracy is the ideal end goal of any democratic system. But for it to work, people need to be educated, healthy, stable, and both interested and invested in the political process.

We’ve a lot of ground to cover between then and now.

Yeah my bad, my math was off and wasn’t looking at it across the multiple years. Makes sense. Cheers mate.

Never encountered fake pot until Covid.

For some reason the increase in demand meant that the streets became filled with synthetic cannabinoid sprayed weed, pesticide sprayed weed and other adulterated products.

It definitely happened before, but it happens much more frequently now than it ever had in the past.

It happens for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. Whether thats to increase the grow weigh, the intensity of the high, the ability to spray it with synthetics after washing it for the real THC or the cheapness of spraying the plants with pesticides for bugs: all of it is to make more money without caring about the consumer.

Legalise it, regulate it, health and safety it.

That slight raise is arguably relatively normal-ish variation. It probably represents the problems with capitalist lack of social care and resources to some degree. But 99.99% of people are still eating.

It’s still bad, it’s still unacceptable, it’s still ridiculous for a wealthy nation and shouldn’t happen, but it’s also not huge, it’s a tiny fraction.

To parse the math, if it keeps rising that would be concerning. But look at the scale… that “3” That the USA reaches isn’t percent. It represents circa 1 in 33,000 people which equates to about 10,000 people in the entire USA.

Whereas according to the same source, North Korea’s famine produced at least 450 sufferers every 100,000. That, represented 1 in 222 people.

Weirdly this actually doesn’t tally with a lot of other sources. So I’m left scratching my head about it somewhat. The above reference suggests only 100,000 people suffered from the famine in North Korea yet, the minimum other sources put as having died in said famine is 360,000 and the maximum of 2,000,000.

Am I missing something? This does not compute.

Edit: Ah the context I was missing was the famine occurred over multiple years. Each year was 420 per 100,000 or below out of 20 million.